When the Spanish entered New Mexico the Franciscans tried to stop dancing at the Pueblos. This was one cause of the Pueblo revolt in 1680. After the Spanish returned, the Franciscans adopted a live and let live attitude toward the dances. The Indians accepted Catholicism as their Religión and regarded the other rites as their costumbres.
After the U.S. conquered New Mexico, the Bureau of Indians Affairs was largely controlled by Protestants who decided the dances were pagan and should be suppressed by the government so that Indians could become individualistic, enlightened, modern Protestants. This campaign reached a peak I the 1920s (along with other anti-dance agitation among Anglos).
But New Mexico and especially Taos had attracted modernist artists who liked the dances. They helped the Pueblos defend the dances on the grounds of religious freedom.
The concept of religion in the First Amendment is a product of an Enlightenment and Protestant milieu and does not describe how other cultures think about themselves. But the Pueblos were forced into defining their customs as “religious” in order to defend them.
The Pueblo Indians used the First Amendment to defend their dances against a Protestant/ BIA attempt to outlaw them. But for the Pueblo Indians, dances and other rituals were as much a part of community work and responsibilities as clearing irrigation ditches. Christian Indians who rejected the dances as pagan therefore claimed the right not to participate in them based on their freedom of religion – and not to suffer any penalties for their refusal. So religious freedom was a two edged sword.
In her book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom, Tisa Wegner of Yale Divinity School examines the complex politics surrounding the dance controversy. Here is her summary:
“By defining themselves as the defenders of Pueblo religion, using the tools of the American legal system if necessary, Pueblo leaders of the 1920s had shaped a new traditionalism based partly on American categories of religion and religious freedom. In concert with modernist reformers, Pueblo traditionalists recognized that naming their practices “religion” could provide a valuable tool for self-defense. They understood that constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion wee a foundational element of American civil discourse. Successfully defining any aspect of Pueblo life as part of an authentic religion, then, could help defend it from government suppression. The Pueblos and their modernist defenders had managed to successfully label the dance ceremonies as “religion, within the public discourse, and thereby to defeat attempts by Christian assimilationists and the BIA to directly forbid them. When BIA polices threatened to further eared tribal sovereignty, Pueblo leaders responded by insisting that their traditions of governance were also religion and therefore equally defensible in terms of religious freedom. Pueblo leaders insisted in liberal democratic religious freedoms and protections as a way to protect their claims to tribal identity. Despite the individualism built into the liberal system, their survival today demonstrates that they were largely successful. Their appeal to religion should not be understood as an imposition of a Western ideology but as an indigenous strategy of resistance, contributing to the ongoing adaptation of Pueblo traditions.”
Wegner is seeking to examine the concept of religion, which, as it appears in the First Amendment, is the product of an Enlightenment and Protestant milieu that identifies religion primarily as a matter of interior sentiments and beliefs. This does not mesh with how other cultures conceive of themselves.
Wegner doesn’t discuss Judaism, but clearly observant and Orthodox Judaism would have many of the same problems as the Pueblos did, and there have been legal attacks on kosher butchering and circumcision. Islam too would have serious problems with the First Amendment conception of religion. The courts want to know whether a practice, such as female circumcision is religious or a only a custom and whether it is a central practice of a religion. But these questions are meaningless outside a specifically Enlightenment conception of religion.
Very interesting! I am learning a lot.